‘Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’ director plans to create low-budget ‘twisted’ kid horror universe with Bambi, Peter Pan and more

The movie world could soon have a new movie universe to rival that of the MCU and MosterVerse, albeit at a significantly lower price point. And with a lot more gore.

After the continued shock success of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honeythe small-budget British slasher that went viral last year and has already grossed nearly $1 million in Mexico ahead of its global theatrical launch on Feb. 15, writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield says he plans an entire universe filled with bloodstained X-rated adaptations of beloved childhood stories.

The filmmaker – who runs the prolific low-budget horror banner Jagged Edge Productions with producer Scott Jeffrey – has already revealed to The Hollywood Reporter last year he was developing Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, based on the book by JM Barries (but this time featuring a “severely obese” Tinkerbell who is “recovering from drugs”). Jeffrey later revealed that he had set his sights on the world’s most famous doe-eyed deer in Bambi: The reckoning (tells the Fear Central website that his Bambi would be a “cruel killing machine”).

But with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey‘s momentum is gaining momentum as it prepares for a full release by Fathom Events on 1,500 screens in the US and numerous other international territories, and with a sequel already in development, Rhys Frake-Waterfield now tells THR that he intends to bring all of these once-family-friendly characters – and more – together into one unruly universe.

“The idea is we’re going to imagine they’re all in the same world so we can have crossovers,” he says. “People are sending messages that they really want to see Bambi versus Pooh.”

While Frake-Waterfield admits that the current crop of ideas — all available for merry clubbing thanks to the original books that have entered the public domain — sounds like a “Disney alternate reality,” with the studio successfully adapting so many of the stories for the screen, he says that is not the intention.

“There are many, many, many other ideas that are not tied to Disney, lots and lots of old fairytales and urban legends, concepts that are synonymous with your childhood, and those are the ideas I want to build into a twisted alternate reality.”